Old T-Shirts, RIP Geocities, and Fairyland

[holdouttrout]

Back in the day--okay, not that far back--let's go with a few years ago, I had a geocities page. It was not nearly as fun or bedecked as everyone else's page, but it served my evil purposes. Which was, mainly, to put up original fic. I kinda cringe at that, now, because man, was that stuff bad. Throughout the years, my very changeable page served to host a few pictures of my travels and a travel log, some horrendous poetry, and, finally, a mirror of my delicious tags. As far as I'm aware, no one ever actually read my website. *grins*

Anyway, I got notice geocities was closing, but it seemed like too much work to transfer everything anywhere else, and downloading proved to be a frustrating and somewhat worthless endeavor, as everything I had on the site I can either find again on some hard drive or disk or disc, don't care about seeing ever again, or have in a hard copy format. (And no, there was no fic on there, except fic that can also be found elsewhere online, and fic that was written before I graduated HIGH SCHOOL. We do not speak of this.)

However, in honor of the end of an era, I link you to this tribute: The Internet's Lament.

cleolinda's twitter directed me to The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, which is a free online YA novel, and is still in progress, unfortunately enough, because I spent quite a while reading it and now I want to know how it ends. I found myself quite drawn in by the description and whimsy of the characters--and the narrator. I love narrators who have a sense of humor.

How many of you, like me, have a few old T-shirts that you will never wear but can't quite bear to throw out because they were the apartment shirt your junior year in college, and you liked that apartment a lot? I was finally fed up enough with them that I googled, trying to find some idea of how to recycle them, since I don't think Goodwill would do a very good job of wanting them, and found this idea for turning them into shopping bags. (Also, if there are other ideas for recycling old T-shirts, let me know in the comments.)

Comments

[sjhw-tolerance.livejournal.com]

Ah...old T-shirts. You can cut them into a long continuous strip and knit or crochet them into rugs.

[holdouttrout.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. Yes, if it wasn't the design I wanted to save, that would be good.

[spiletta42.livejournal.com]

If you have an attachment to a particular tee shirt, like something left over from childhood, you could turn it into a pillow. Flip it inside out, sew the bottom, the neck, and one sleeve (from close to the shoulder -- the excess sleeve can hide inside the pillow) closed, turn it right side out, stuff polyfill or whatever else is handy in through the remaining sleeve, tuck and sew that -- and, pillow!

[holdouttrout.livejournal.com]

Cool, thanks!

[rihansu.livejournal.com]

If you have a bunch of them, you can turn them into a quilt. My aunt was a high school student counsel adviser and was constantly collecting t-shirts from meetings and seminars and what not. She would cut the designs off the fronts and use them as quilt squares. My sister did the same thing with all her old concert t-shirts from her heavy metal phase.

I don't know exactly how they did it, but I just googled 't-shirt quilt,' and it looks like there are some pretty easy instructions out there.

[holdouttrout.livejournal.com]

Nice! That's a great idea, especially if you have a ton of them.

[ziparumpazoo]

I've done this. Only I took the fronts ( or backs, if that's where the interesting parts are) and sewed them on to a large piece of plain cotton, then snadwiched the whole thing with some batting and a backing and sewed it all together by stitching along the outside of each shirt. My mom is the sentimental one who ended up hanging it on the wall in the family room, since the shirts were collect on family vacations over the years. It's a quick weekend project.

[holdouttrout.livejournal.com]

That's awesome.

[vflick.livejournal.com]

Yes, this is what I'm doing with all the t-shirts from all my band tours! Just cutting out the logos, ironing them on to stabalizer, and then adding sashing to make uniformly sized squares. And then sandwich with batting and a backing (I'm thinking about making a backing from old jeans - jeans and tshirt quilt!) and then tying it. Doesn't seem logical to try to sew through all those layers. If I'm using tshirts that I really want to save instead of use though, I won't do the jean backing, since that won't hang well. I think I have enough Ts for several quilts though. :) I might be a bit sentimental.

I was thinking of using the scraps from the Quilt Ts - like the backs and whatever's left of the front after I cut out the design I want - for strips to crochet, or braid into rugs, or my most recent idea is to make woven baskets with bent coat hangers and fabric scraps... I'll post a pic if/when I get there.

I love the shopping bag idea though! I have a few Ts that aren't really sentimental and I might just do that with them right away instead of goodwill. (I don't think goodwill would want these Ts anyway.)

I might have thought about this a bit before. :)

[holdouttrout.livejournal.com]

A tour quilt sounds fabulous! I think maybe I don't really have quite enough for a quilt of my own T-shirts, but I'm totally saving the idea--I know that in the past I've had tons of T-shirts that just got thrown away because I didn't know what else to do with them, and it would have been awesome to have a "memories" quilt.

[nandamai]

I just got rid of a whole lot of those t-shirts in the recent closet purge. It pained me.

The Geocities Lament link is awesome.

[holdouttrout.livejournal.com]

Geocities was WAY cool back in the day. And then not. *g*

It's hard to get rid of those T-shirts, because it's really memories you're tossing. So hard.

[stargazercmc.livejournal.com]

I would think you can use them as outer decor for purses as well.

[holdouttrout.livejournal.com]

Oooh. Good call.

[poetressforgod.livejournal.com]

I second and third the purses and quilts idea. I have been cutting out logos on tshirts and adding them to my fabric stock for years now. have yet to actually make anything, but what else is new?

[holdouttrout.livejournal.com]

Hee. That's the nice thing about the bag idea--the process probably takes about...10 minutes. For the first shirt. And then two minutes for each one after that.

But I LOVE the idea of a college shirt quilt. If I had a few more lying around, I'd probably do that instead.